President Trump is at Bedminster for the US Open, and he says everyone there is thrilled that the stock market is doing so well since the election. Just for the record then, here’s our occasional look at the stock market since President Obama took office. The trend line is for 2009 through the 2016 election, and then extended to this week. As you can see, the market is doing exactly as well as it did during the eight years of Obama’s presidency.

A couple of days ago I wrote about the mystery of why my camera refuses to let me set a shutter speed longer than one second when it’s in “silent mode.” Thanks to the hive mind of the web, I have an answer. Sort of. This is a little long, and probably of little interest to any but camera geeks, so you’ve been warned. Here we go.

In the past, cameras had mechanical shutters. The usual type was the focal-plane shutter, which is basically a piece of cloth with a small slit that zips across the plane of the film. The faster it moves, and the smaller the slit, the higher the shutter speed. A high shutter speed like 1/1000th of a second is good for stopping motion. Here is my camera, for example, taking a picture of a ceiling fan:

The quality is so-so because the light was dim, but the motion is stopped.

Digital cameras, however, don’t really need a mechanical shutter. They use electronic sensors to capture light, so all you have to do is turn the sensor on for 1/1000th of a second and then turn it off. As it turns out, though, this is not how it works.

Instead, digital cameras turn each row of pixels on for 1/1000th of a second. This process starts with the top row and then moves down, until eventually (on my camera) it gets to row 3648. The entire process takes about a twentieth of a second (compared to 1/250th of a second for a mechanical shutter), and this creates a problem: by the time we get to the bottom row, the object has moved. Here’s the ceiling fan with the electronic shutter activated:

The fan blades are curved. Each individual row of pixels is sharp because it’s on for only 1/1000th of a second, but the entire picture isn’t. With fast-moving objects, you get both motion blur and distortion.

I didn’t know this until yesterday. I vaguely knew that my camera had both a mechanical and an electronic shutter, but I didn’t really know when one was used vs. the other. And I thought that “silent mode” merely meant that the camera turned off the fake noise it normally generated to make itself sound like an old-school SLR.

Not so. In silent mode, the electronic shutter is used. Turn it off, and the mechanical shutter is used. And the sound isn’t fake, it’s actually the sound of the mechanical shutter.

Normally, when I take pictures of birds and butterflies and whatnot, I put the camera in silent mode. Don’t want to scare off the critters! But in silent mode there’s really no such thing as a high shutter speed. A setting of 1/1000th of a second will produce the right exposure, but it doesn’t stop motion as well as it should. For that I need to use the mechanical shutter. So today I tried that out. The local honeybees were not very cooperative, but here’s one anyway:

Not too bad. The wings are blurry, of course. I’d probably need something like 1/10,000th of a second to stop those. This might be possible if I play around with exposure and fill flash, and perhaps I’ll do that later.

So does this answer my question from Thursday? Sort of. In silent mode, the electronic shutter is activated, and Panasonic’s engineers have decided that the electronic shutter shouldn’t work for longer than one second. This moves the ball a bit, but still leaves an open question: why is the electronic shutter limited to one second? I still don’t know the answer to that. It appears to be a problem limited to Panasonic cameras.

Shep Smith: "The deception, Chris, is mind-boggling…why are we getting told all these lies?"

Chris Wallace: "I don't know what to say" pic.twitter.com/DQKOAC8a2o

— Leanne Naramore (@LeanneNaramore) July 14, 2017

Yesterday, Fox News renegade Shep Smith went on a mini-rant about Donald Trump. “If there’s nothing there…why all these lies?” he asked Chris Wallace. “Why is it lie after lie after lie?” Aaron Blake of the Washington Post comments:

Most journalists are reluctant to use the L-word — “lie.” This blog has covered the administration’s contradictory claims and misleading statistics regularly, but calling something a lie implies you know that it was intended to deceive. An exasperated Smith had clearly had enough of dancing around that word on Friday afternoon.

Journalists are reluctant to call something a lie, and with good reason. To be a lie, something has to be incontrovertibly untrue and the speaker has to know it’s untrue. Politicians say incontrovertibly untrue things frequently, but it’s the second part of this formula that trips us up. Short of mind reading, how can we know that they were aware of the falsehood?

Occasionally, of course, we really can know for sure. Most of the time, though, we just have to do our best, and we have to apply a standard of “beyond reasonable doubt,” not “beyond all possible doubt.”

In the case of Don Jr. and the meeting with the Russian attorney, we have proof beyond a reasonable doubt. We know that his first statement was not off the cuff, but carefully crafted on Air Force One by the White House. He said it was just a quick meeting about Russian adoptions. The next day, after the New York Times demonstrated this was untrue, he admitted it was actually about getting dirt on Hillary. Two days later, after the Times once again poked holes in his story, he released emails showing that he knew beforehand it was part of a Russian government effort to smear Hillary Clinton.

At each step along the way, he admitted only what he had to. He revealed more only when forced by the Times. No reasonable person thinks he just forgot about all this until the Times jogged his memory. He was, obviously, lying.

More generally, Donald Trump Sr. has told so many untruths, and continued telling them even after they were thoroughly called out, that we have to assume he does it on purpose. It’s not beyond all possible doubt that he’s really so clueless that he doesn’t realize what he’s doing. But it is beyond any reasonable doubt. At this point, it’s fair for our default judgment to be that when Trump says something untrue, he’s lying and he knows it.

Either that or he’s clinically delusional, in which case he needs to be removed from office. Take your pick.

Tom Williams/Congressional Quarterly/Newscom via ZUMA

Pretty much every group associated with health care in any way opposes Trumpcare. Doctors, nurses, hospitals, patient advocates, pharmaceutical companies, the folks who wax hospital floors, you name it. The only exception is insurance companies, who have stayed quiet because they’ve been bought off with a few miscellaneous tax breaks and new subsidies.

But now, even the insurance companies are fed up. They have looked into the abyss of the newly-proposed Cruz Amendment, and they understand precisely what kind of hell their own industry would unleash on the world if it passes. Their letter to Mitch McConnell minces no words:

It is simply unworkable in any form …. would undermine protections for those with pre-existing medical conditions …. increase premiums …. would allow the new plans to “cherry pick” only healthy people …. creates two systems of insurance for healthy and sick people …. premiums will skyrocket for people with preexisting conditions …. millions of more individuals will become uninsured ….would harm consumers who are most in need of coverage.

The Cruz Amendment is sort of like chopping a baby in half: a solution that sounds appealing only to someone who doesn’t know what happens to babies who are chopped in half. And so I wonder. Did Ted Cruz understand the problems with his amendment when he dreamed it up, but didn’t care? Or did he just not bother to check with anyone who understood health policy before he proposed it? It’s the eternal conundrum: Evil or stupid?

It looks like health insurance rates will go up a lot next year, but not because medical inflation is high or because insurers aren’t making money under Obamacare. Mostly it’s because insurers are nervous about whether they’re going to lose the CSR subsidies that are part of Obamacare. President Trump has deliberately chosen to keep this dangling, so insurers have to raise their rate requests in case he decides to stop paying it. Insurers are also nervous about the individual mandate, which helps bring young, healthy customers into the insurance pool. Republicans have been talking about officially forbidding the IRS from enforcing it, and if that happens rates will have to go up too.

Charles Gaba has gone through the rate requests of 20 states, and he figures that these two things account for about 71 percent of the size of the rate hikes that have been requested so far. In other words, if insurers in your state are asking for a 20 percent increase, 6 percent of that is from normal causes and 14 percent is from deliberate Republican efforts to destabilize the individual market.

California’s exchanges are well run, and the state is fully committed to Obamacare. The state insurance commissioner has asked insurers to submit two rate requests for 2018—one with and one without uncertainty over CSR and the mandate—and these rate requests are set to be unveiled on Monday. It’s going to be an important bellwether.

Hilbert and Hopper are watching the Bastille Day fireworks! Or, possibly, a hummingbird that just zoomed by. Your call.

A pair of researchers conducted a survey on homelessness and claim to have been surprised at the results:

We uncovered a strange pattern. On one hand, majorities support both aid (60 percent) and subsidized housing (65 percent), with only a small percentage opposing these policies — by 19 and 17 percent, respectively. On the other, a majority supports banning panhandling (52 percent) and a plurality supports banning sleeping in public (46 percent) — while only about a quarter of the public opposes these policies, by 23 and 30 percent, respectively.

This does not seem strange to me at all. Most people don’t like being accosted by panhandlers and don’t like their park benches being taken over by potentially dangerous vagrants. At the same time, most people aren’t heartless bastards and understand that the homeless need somewhere to live and sleep. Both of these are perfectly understandable reactions:

The researchers solved their conundrum by suggesting that most people are disgusted by the homeless. No kidding. About half the homeless suffer from a mental illness and a third abuse either alcohol or drugs. You’d be crazy not to have a reflexive disgust of a population like that. Is that really so hard to get?

None of this means we can’t or shouldn’t have empathy for the homeless. Of course we should, if we want to call ourselves decent human beings. In fact, overcoming reflexive feelings is what makes us decent human beings in the first place. There’s just no need to deny that these reflexes are both innate and perfectly understandable.

Chris Kleponis/DPA via ZUMA

Last month Jared Kushner organized a meeting of tech giants to meet with President Trump. Tim Cook was there. Jeff Bezos was there. Larry Page was there. In all, companies with market caps ranging from $9 billion to $770 billion were there.

Plus the CEO of a teensy little startup with a market cap of $0.2 billion. Can you guess who it was? Can you? Huh?

Of course not. You’ve never heard of either the CEO or the company. The answer is Zachary Bookman of OpenGov, a company partly owned by Kushner’s brother, Joshua Kushner. I’m sure Josh’s investment will do well now that OpenGov has gotten this kind of high-profile attention. And that’s what brothers are for, aren’t they?

Jared Kushner is a one-man wrecking crew in the White House. If Donald Trump’s enemies were trying to infiltrate his inner circle and destroy his presidency, they couldn’t do better than Kushner. The only thing that keeps me from thinking Kushner is a DNC plant or a mutant super villain is the fact that he’s so obviously dim that his actions make a sort of demented sense. Eventually he’s going to bring the entire White House down around Donald Trump’s ears, and the whole time he’ll be standing there with that weird, blank look on his face, thinking that everything is still just fine.

The Wall Street Journal has the whole story here. Apologies for the log scale in the chart below. It was the only way to show all the companies on a single axis.

The Trumpies sure have lied a lot about a big ol’ nothingburger of a meeting, haven’t they?

Remember that meeting between Don Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, and a Russian lawyer who promised them government-supplied dirt on Hillary Clinton? Sure you do. It turns out there was one other person who attended:

The Russian lawyer who met with Donald Trump Jr. and others on the Trump team after a promise of compromising material on Hillary Clinton was accompanied by a Russian-American lobbyist — a former Soviet counterintelligence officer who is suspected by some U.S. officials of having ongoing ties to Russian intelligence, NBC News has learned.

….The Russian-born American lobbyist served in the Soviet military and emigrated to the U.S., where he holds dual citizenship. The Associated Press identified the lobbyist as Rinat Akhmetshin, and said he acknowledged attending the meeting, though he said it was not substantive. “I never thought this would be such a big deal, to be honest,” he told the AP.

Let’s not make too big a deal out of this. Lots of Russian attorneys with close ties to Putin probably invite former GRU agents to tag along when they meet with the brain trust of a presidential candidate to chat about state-supplied oppo on their opponent. I mean, it was summer and everyone was on vacation. This guy was probably the only translator with free time, amirite?